Literary
Itinerary: ‘Heroine’s
Journey’ guideposts appear in most good tales

by Colin Seymour

If your novel has a protagonist--it does,
doesn’t it?--you ought to be aware of the concept of the hero’s journey. That’s
pretty much where Valerie Estelle Frankel, our September 13 dinner speaker, will
be taking us, and it just might change our conceptions about character arc.

The hero, after all, is the ultimate
literary archetype, as these definitions from Webster’s dictionary indicate:

HERO: A mythological or
legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability
. . . an illustrious warrior . . . a man admired for his achievements and
qualities . . . one that shows great courage . . . the principal male character
in a literary or dramatic work . . . the central

figure in an event or period.

“Many are familiar with Joseph Campbell’s
theory of the hero’s journey,” Frankel said by way of pitching her workshops,
“the idea that every man through myth and literature grows to adulthood while
battling his dark alter-ego. This is the Star Wars or Harry Potter plot, a staple for fantasy,
coming-of-age, and other genres.”

Frankel has altered that definition in
her new book, From Girl
to Goddess: The Heroine’s

Journey in Myth and Legend,
which, she says, “explores the
classic heroine’s journey step-by-step in ancient myths and modern fantasy,
revealing the other
epic journey.

“In tales as old as 1001 Nights and Cupid and Psyche,
heroines battle seductresses

and witches to ascend to the role of
mother-goddess.” Frankel, 31, a mythologist who has lectured in several college
classrooms, including those at San Jose State, knew she was onto something when
“I was sitting down trying to plot the perfect fantasy novel and what they all
had in common, and there emerged the classic hero’s journey . . . the magic
sword passed down from the father, and the traitor, . . . and nobody had written
about the women.”

So she wove her book around the hero’s
journey, and in her version these are the milestones we should consider for our
own heroes’ journeys:

Call to Adventure; Refusal of
the Call; Mentor and Talisman; Crossing the Threshold Sidekicks, Trials,
Adversaries; Wedding the Animus; Confronting the Powerless Father; Defeating the
Shadow; The Nadir of the World; Atonement with the Mother; Reward: Winning the
Family; The Magic Flight Return; Power Over Life and Death; Ascension of the New
Mother.

You may feel resistant to the hero or
heroine angle. Those terms have been attached to athletes

and other performers so much in recent
years that they have become more caricature than character. Toons abound.
There’s even a documentary about urban do-gooders and vigilantes that bills them
as “Superheroes.” But Frankel doesn’t dwell on the simpleminded stuff. “The
modern hero has moved beyond that,” she says, with Odysseus making way for, say,
Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, “more about thinking and introspection, not just the
big , brawling Hercules sort.” Maybe you’ve been scoping the hero’s journey
trailheads more than you know.

“J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter author)
has never said she was deliberately following the

Campbell model,” Frankel notes, “but
inadvertently she has put her characters through a hero’s journey.” Frankel is
also likely to discuss where works such as Coraline, The Chronicles of
Narnia, and The

Wizard of Oz” apply.

But it is not fantasy-specific.

“Every culture has the heroine’s
journey,” Frankel says. “I found a Rapunzel story in Tahiti. I was finding the same
stories all over.”

Some of these are old enough that they
were not contaminated by European culture, she says. Nevertheless, “the most
popular story in the world is Cinderella,
if we define Cinderella as Poor Picked-on Kid Becomes the Best of Them All. It’s
not just because others have heard the story. The main reason is, everyone wants
to hear that story.